Like several other acts who arrived from somewhere else
but thrived in the fabulous exaggerations of England's glam
era, Mott the Hoople had a strong impact on the new wave
scene a few years later. These streetwise blokes voiced a
sense of disillusionment and failure instead of indulging in
the fantasy and self-aggrandizement typical of so many
big-league rockers. Punks saw themselves as fighting against
the same climate of unreality and vanity. The tight, driving
guitar sound of Mick Ralphs was later appropriated in whole
by the Clash, Pistols and, most pointedly, Generation X.
Mott's "Violence" and The Hoople's "Crash
Street Kids" both forecast with uncanny accuracy the
emergence of a new generation of disaffected, angry kids.
Singer Ian Hunter produced Gen X's second LP, Valley of
the Dolls. The late Guy Stevens, who pulled Mott
together and produced their first four LPs, produced the
Clash's London Calling. Mick Jones co-produced
Hunter's sixth solo record, Short Back n' Sides.

Opening with the whiplash triptych of a charged but
directionless vocal-less cover of "You Really Got Me"
(beating Van Halen to the punch by nearly a decade), an epic
version of the Sir Douglas Quintet's Texas-centric "At the
Crossroads" that quickly abandons any pretense at the song's
country feel and Sonny Bono's maudlin and already dated
"Laugh at Me," Mott the Hoople (the band name came from the
title of a novel by Willard Manus, who got it in part from
an old cartoon strip character), the band's debut album
revealed nothing clear about its purpose. New arrival Ian
Hunter's voice is semi-buried in the mix, which blurs
together Verden Allen's Blonde on Blonde organ,
Ralphs' guitar work, which ranges from subtle accents to
raging full-on rock smoke. The rhythm section of bassist
Overend Watts and Buffin (a nickname drummer Dale Griffin
later professed to hating) lumbers a bit, but it was 1969,
after all, and heavy was certainly one of British rock's
precepts. The album (with its snappy MC Escher cover) is an
up-and-down affair which peaks with the ferocious and
focused sneer of Ralphs' "Rock and Roll Queen" and ends in a
90-second fade-in/fade-out chunk of hysterically raucous
jamming titled "Wrath and Wroll," authorship credited to
producer Guy Stevens. (A third instrumental, "Rabbit Foot
and Toby Time," is organized enough to be memorable and
segues seamlessly into the next track, but it still begs the
question why vocals got such short shrift.) Between, Hunter
rolls out a strong but overly worshipful pseudo-Dylan
ballad, "Backsliding Fearlessly," and wends his way through
eleven glorious minutes of Ralphs' "Half Moon Bay," setting
a template for the band's long, winding roads hung on simply
repeated chord patterns linked by exploding bridges and then
detouring into a different song entirely; in this case, a
classical-styled Hunter piano piece.

Mad Shadows retains Stevens (the producer is also
credited with "spiritual percussion, psychic piano") but
eschews any non-originals and relies on a pair of Ralphs
compositions and five by Hunter. The difference between
their writing styles, the decision to let the guitarist sing
his own tunes and Stevens' eccentric influence makes for an
uneven and ultimately disappointing second record. Hunter
shows his strengths in the pounding surge of "Walkin' With a
Mountain" (which oddly incorporates "Jumpin' Jack Flash")
and the impassioned "When My Mind's Gone"; his other ballads
are listless, meandering and plain. Ralphs blends plaintive
singing, atmospheric piano-guitar pairings and a snarling
"Green Manalishi" attack in "Thunderbuck Ram," but that's as
good as it gets. At this point, it was becoming clear that
Ralphs fueling Hunter's vision was the band's best creative
bet, but it's not likely Ralphs thought so.

Wildlife, recorded in a hodgepodge of overlapping
sessions (including a filler 10-minute live take of "Keep a
Knockin'") with Stevens nowhere in evidence, is a dud from
one end to the other. While the audio quality is night and
day better than on the first two records, the music is quite
the opposite, both in imagination and energy. Restraint does
nothing to flatter Ralphs' forgettable songs (especially the
mock-country "It Must Be Love"), and Hunter's are (and fare)
little better waterlogged with strings. Amazingly, for all
sorts of reasons, the best track on Mott the Hoople's third
album is a fervent rendition of Melanie's "Lay Down." A
shocking mistake of a record.

The story could have ended there miserably had the group
not reunited with Stevens and made the absolutely mad and
absolutely great Brain Capers. Throwing all the
ingredients in the pot, turning the heat up high, trotting
out a couple of weird covers and jamming the brakes on
Ralphs' ego, Stevens put the band back on track in a big,
big way. Whatever it took to pull out such brilliantly
titled roaring, organ-and-guitar duels (with Hunter wailing
right over the top) as the bookends "Death May Be Your Santa
Claus" and "Tale of the Quivering Meat Conception," Stevens
and his boys did it up right. There's a feeling of unity of
purpose and a complete lack of restraint that makes the
whole thing delirious fun. Along the way, "The Moon
Upstairs" and "Sweet Angeline" are rockers happily
comparable to "Rock and Roll Queen" (overlooking the points
at which a missed cue in the latter leads the band to simply
fall apart, audibly noted by Hunter's chuckle). Ralphs turns
Jesse Colin Young's "Darkness Darkness" into a moody and
pummeling reverie and Hunter is a surefooted balladeer at
the start of "The Journey," which then seethes into soaring
rock power and concludes, after nine minutes of searching
reflection, in a blaze of guitar squalling. He finds a
useful purpose for Dion's "Your Own Backyard" as well. This
should have been the album that brought Mott the Hoople in
from the margins, but it wasn't. Still, it's the best of the
first four and a truly essential souvenir of the era.
Rock and Roll Queen is an eight-track distillation
that omits "Sweet Angeline" and includes "Keep a Knockin'"
but is otherwise a fair sampler of the band's Atlantic era.

As potent a force as Stevens was for Mott, the missing
ingredient, it turned out, was David Bowie, who liked the
group and, in 1972, reversing a turn from disillusion to
dissolution, agreed to produce a final album, thoughtfully
tossing a quintessentially brilliant teen-tribe solidarity
anthem, "All the Young Dudes," and his distinctive saxophone
toots into the bargain. Their resulting album, which begins
with a brisk, clean, tight take on the Velvets' "Sweet
Jane," complete with a thoughtful humdinger of a Ralphs
solo, is a glam rock landmark, a gimmicky, stylish,
compressed and dry declaration of cultural inclusion ("One
of the Boys," "All the Young Dudes"), abounding with odd
characters ("Sucker," "Momma's Little Jewel," "Sweet Jane,"
"Jerkin' Crocus"), cutting guitar music and Hunter's
over-the-top theatricality. Ralphs earns his spotlight here,
weakly vocalizing the stirring "Ready for Love/After
Lights," which, minus the guitar solo coda, would become a
durable BadCo crowd-pleaser. Even Allen gets a look-in,
inadvisably singing the organ showcase "Soft Ground." The
lone ballad, "Sea Diver," although it gave a name to the
band's fan club, is overproduced piffle. Ultimately, for all
its impact, All the Young Dudes was less substantial
than it seemed at the time, a blinding flash which left
spots but little vision. Imagine if Bowie had handed over
"Rebel Rebel" instead. (The reissue adds single sides,
demos, a live "Jane" and Bowie's ungainly but fascinating
guide vocal for "Dudes.")

The self-produced Mott proves how well they
learned their lessons from the Thin White Duke: bolstered by
newfound commercial confidence, Mott made an album with a
warmer tone, obsessive self-awareness and a great set of
songs, reconsidered with the singles chart in mind. Too
smart and mature (he was already in his mid-30s) not to be
ironically amused and at least a little removed from the
fantasy exhilaration of success, Hunter ruminates on the
story so far in the rambunctious "All the Way From Memphis"
(and how horrible does the word "spade" now sound?), the
grandiose but grateful "Hymn for the Dudes" and the album's
monumental centerpiece, the solemn, haunting "Ballad of Mott
the Hoople (March 26, 1972  Zurich)." "Honaloochie
Boogie" is a perfect formulaic glam single: killer hook, big
chorus, easy singalong, vocal gimmickry, a catch phrase or
three ("My hair gets longer as the beat gets stronger /
Wanna tell Chuck Berry my news"). Ralphs comes up with
another two-part winner, the handsome "I'm a Cadillac/El
Camino Dolo Roso." The curtain finally drops with the
eyebrow-raising romance of "I Wish I Was Your Mother." (The
reissue adds a DOA slow demo of "Honaloochie Boogie," a
dutiful B-side and two other cuts.)

That was the end of the original band. Ralphs left to
partner with Paul Rodgers, and he was followed in the lineup
by onetime Spooky Tooth guitarslinger Luther Grosvenor,
calling himself Ariel Bender, and then Mick Ronson, who
continued on with Hunter after the band was finally put out
of its misery.

The Hoople, a hodgepodge studio affair with
Grosvenor in place and the mustachioed dandy Morgan Fisher
taking over from Verden Allen on keyboards (but with Ralphs
on a couple of tracks and sessionfolk adding horns, strings
and vocals), leans heavily on an oldies sound with horns and
pumpin' piano. (How glam managed to seem modern while
embracing '50s rock and roll is one of life's great
mysteries.) The band's leftover spirit and momentum gets it
over the hump of losing a creative mainstay, but the album
peters out too quickly to make everything alright. One swell
single ("Roll Away the Stone"), its inferior follow-up, the
overtly Wizzard-like "The Golden Age of Rock 'n' Roll" (has
any other band of any repute cited the phrase in lyrics as
frequently?) and the gimmicky/theatrical "Marionette" aren't
enough to make up for a Watts lead vocal ("Born Late '58"),
an overblown power ballad ("Through the Looking Glass") and
the filler that otherwise occupies the album.

The live album, recorded half in London (December 14,
1973) and half six months later in New York (May 9, 1974),
is mostly godawful. I recall the New York gig, a multi-night
Broadway engagement with those glammy upstarts Queen as
Mott's opening act, fondly, but the documentation here spits
on that memory. Lost in the muddy sound, Hunter's singing is
alternately campy and cavalier but consistently off-pitch.
His entreaties in "All the Young Dudes," which felt so
messianic at the time, are revealed to be just rote
stagecraft. Grosvenor proves himself a wanker of the second
magnitude, replacing Ralphs' subtlety and eloquence with
showy excess. (Don't even bring up the drum solo…) The
London side is noticeably better, with the self-appointed
leader of the gang in a chatty mood; the band is limber
enough to drive out of "Rock 'n' Roll Queen," through the
Beatles' "Get Back," a few bars of the Peter Gunn
theme and "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" before revving up
"Violence." Say goodnight, everyone.